In today's fast paced business environment, individuals on-the-move, often need to receive information, such as, but not limited to voice messages and/or electronic files, documents and/or messages, be they multimedia or otherwise, said information being transmitted from a remote location and destined for the mobile individual. For their data communicating needs, these individuals may employ a plethora of communicating devices such as, for example, pagers, radio telephones, personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and the like. Each of these above devices is typically optimized to carry a specific type or format of data over a particular type of communication network.
Notwithstanding these limitations, the typical business individual may nonetheless prefer to receive a particular type of information at a particular one of her communicating devices. For example, she may desire to receive all electronic mail messages (i.e., E-Mail) at her desktop personal computer when she is in the office. When at home or traveling, however, she may prefer to receive all E-Mail messages at her notebook personal computer. Depending upon the urgency of the information, the recipient may prefer to receive the information immediately or instead have it routed to a colleague. As an alternative, low priority information may be sent to yet another destination device for storage and later retrieval. Where the information is routable to the recipient via more than one communication network, issues relating to cost, security, transmit time, etc., may be taken into consideration.
Unfortunately, the party seeking to transmit the information typically has no idea of the recipient's location or of the recipient's communication preferences, such as, for example, where she desires E-Mail messages to be delivered. It would be extremely advantageous therefore to provide a method and apparatus for routing information within a communication system which takes into consideration subscriber specified preferences.